Well it depends how large you are talking about. With todays internet speeds, anything under 10GB is a less than a few minutes.

I once accidentally locked a production MySQL database with some kind of recursive sub query.

Running queries locally on a copy avoids lock/mutation issues, and I have a snapshot to re-run queries on if I need to go back and see the source of the data.

I guess there's a lot of cases I just want to peek into a table live without pulling it all down. I've only used postgres so it's weird to me you can't talk to any MySql style DB like it does.

Anything that needs to be coded I'll pull it down though, it's nice to have options.